“Yeah. Always sounds hollow. But what else is there to say?”

“True enough.” He stared out at the people gathering in remembrance of his father. Evan had seemed close to him. Daniel could be exacting, but he had also been warm in a way Valerie never was with either of them, but especially Evan.

“Do you remember much about your parents’ funerals?” he asked.

Naomi’s throat tightened. “Not much.” She had been nine for one and ten for the other. She remembered two pristine coffins, on two different days, and both times thinking it seemed a waste for something so shiny and new to go down in the dark for no one else to see. Her father’s had been closed casket. Her mother’s had been open, but she wished it’d been shut.

Naomi only started speaking again a few months after the second funeral. Valerie had always said Catherine was travelling for work. It’d taken Naomi years before she’d realised her mother had gone to a mental health institution after the fire, unable to cope with the loss of her husband and home. The pressure of a company, of a daughter, had been too much on top of the grief.

Naomi had been the one to find her mother’s body when she was on weekend release from the centre. Sometime in the night, her mother had gone out into Valerie’s garden. Stumbled over the edge of one of the steep steps of the landscaped levels. Broke her neck, right at the C3 vertebrae. It had been quick, they said, painless. That image was burned into Naomi’s retina for years. In some ways, it was worse than the memories of the fire.

“I’ve been lucky, I guess,” Evan said. “Here I am, almost thirty, and I haven’t really lost anyone before.”

“Burying your parents is especially hard,” she said. “And grief is strange, so don’t be surprised by that. You’ll feel sad, then all right again, then guilty for feeling all right. Then the weirdest thought or memory will be the one that gets to you. Sometimes even years later.” Naomi was still sad every time she smelled pancakes because her dad used to make the best ones.

Evan made a noise in his throat, taking everyone in. “Does the number of people who turn up show how much of an impact you left behind, do you think?”

Naomi shrugged a shoulder. “Think it depends more on if they’re actually mourning rather than appearing to.”

Evan winced, and Naomi realised she’d just implied everyone here was only pretending to care about his dad’s death.